Paul Calvert spoke with Amer, the manager of the research and curriculum department

Based on solid New Testament scholarship and the most up-to-date archaeology, Nazareth Village brings to life a farm and Galilean village, recreating Nazareth as it was 2,000 years ago. Paul Calvert spoke with Amer, the manager of the research and curriculum department.

Paul: What is the Nazareth Village?

Amer: The Nazareth village is a co-operative project for Christians from all over the world. The idea is to create a living pattern of a village at the time of Jesus in order that visitors to the Holy Land can understand how life looked like and how Jesus used living patterns in order to form his message, his parables and stories.

Paul: What can you see here today?

Amer: Today visitors will experience life in Jesus' time. They will see a created village with houses, synagogue and olive press, built using the same kind of materials that they had back then; the same styles exactly and also people. Villagers will be dressing in the same kind of clothes as the first century, showing and living the life. The visitor will experience going back 2000 years and living at the time of Jesus.

We are following the seasons here too. What I mean by that is in different times of the year visitors that come can experience different things, because the farmer experiences different things during the year. In the winter he had to plough the fields and prepare the land and sowing the seeds; in the spring the wheat and keep them till the harvest time. In the summer the visitors that come will see us doing the harvest and threshing the wheat and in the autumn we pick the olives and press them in the olive press we have here. So in different times of the year you see different things.

Paul: It is autumn now and the olives are ripe and being squashed. How did they do it in Jesus' time?

Amer: Today we are operating our olive press and it is an exact replica to the one that was found in Gamla from the time of Jesus. We press using the old techniques, which is three stages that the olives have to pass. First of all they have to be ground with a grinding stone that the donkey would push.

Paul: Do you actually have a live donkey there today?

Amer: Yes sure, this is the first step. Then they would collect the ground pulp into baskets and take them to the press, which is a kind of wooden beam. It is very heavy and it would lie on the baskets. The baskets are made of palm branches, so they allow the liquid to pass through. The pulp would stay inside the basket, but the oil would flow out and be collected underneath the baskets where there is a collecting hole. Then the third step is to collect the oil by a vessel and separate the oil from the water because olives also have water in them. Since the water is heavier the oil is going to be floating on top so they just scoop it out from the top and that's all.

Paul: And this is the same as Jesus would have done in his day?

Amer: Exactly.

Paul: And you have a wine press as well, how did they do the wine in Jesus' day?

Amer: The wine press is first century, it's not a replica. It's a different time of year when the grape would be ripe. It's in the summer time July and August. First of all the wine press is in two parts; the upper part is kind of a basin which leads up through a channel into a collecting vat. Now what they need to do is harvest the grapes and put them on the upper part, the basin and then they would take their sandals away and just walk on the grapes; step on them with bare feet. They will press the grapes and the juice will flow down through the channel which connects the basin into the lower vat. All the juice will be collected into the lower vat. Then they would scoop them out and ferment them into wine.